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Our Great Leader this month is Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff.
Freddie led the England team to its biggest defeat in the Ashes series since 1920/21! Find out why I still think he is a great leader by reading the article.
Managing people is a strange task. People rarely react the same way to the same stimulus, we learn from our experiences.
Managing a group of people is stranger still. Now you have the interplay between each pair to manage as well. No surprise then that we tend to focus on how much work gets done.
Suppose the manager walks round ticking off people who do not seem to be working. This sends the message that it is important to look like you are working. Thereafter people look like they are working. In fact effort is diverted from doing the work to looking like you are doing the work!
Consider two people: one with feet up on an empty desk and one toiling away at a desk laden with papers. Which person do you applaud?
The best people I have managed always made the work look easy. While their colleagues rushed around in a frenzy they appear calm and relaxed. At a glance their frenzied colleagues look busier, but do the busy but less well organised actually achieve more? Is there a difference between activity and achievement?
Of course, low activity and low achievement sometimes go together, as do high achievement and high activity. This all has to be managed to bring achievement up to par and make achieving easier.
How does your organization manage? Do you manage by appearances or by results?
This month Google pointed a search to our site to answer the question “How do I get the motivation to manage the staff?”
When we meet people in seminars there are many who show signs of stress, time pressure and destructively bad work-life balance. Those whose work includes managing others are doubly troubled, as they know they are not getting the performance they should from their people. How could they when they have so much else to do?
How do you motivate yourself to overcome these huge obstacles?
The advice is usually to learn the power of “No”. To learn to decline to do that extra task your manager has asked you to do. Not many of us feel happy doing that for  obvious reasons!
Your job is to make your manager’s job easier by taking on those extra tasks. Just as your people should be taking on more of your tasks.
In many organizations, the more senior the manager is, the more stressed and overworked they are. While those reporting to the manager are desperately wishing for something interesting to do.
An oversimplification perhaps, because all the other good motivation management practices have to be in place to achieve proper delegation of tasks.
In this glorious organization your people do the majority of your tasks and you review progress with the lightest of touches. You can now say “Yes” when your manager asks you to do something extra. You get to do different things, all good preparation for when you apply for your manager’s job!
Make the time to manage tomorrow, today.
 Thought provoking?
Have we made you stop and think about your own organisation and what could be gained by improving things?
If you are curious about the improvements in performance that are possible, or you would like to know how to solve specific performance problems, then resolve to make a difference this minute.
You pay people to come to work. What they do when they get there depends on their motivation.
Our next Perform
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